Menu

Monthly Archives: March 2018

I don’t use social media, but I’m on a lot of email lists, including the “Trump Make America Great Again Committee,” as well as various Democratic lists that span that party’s often-fractious ideological spectrum. It’s like reading missives from warring universes, factions that are wholly uninterested in understanding different points of view, intent solely on […]

“The land was ours before we were the land’s,” Robert Frost, The Gift Outright The hard and resolute granite peaks of the Teton Range that rise dramatically above Wyoming’s Jackson Valley are not as unchanging as they appear. In fact, the mountains are still growing – although at the rate of about a millimeter a […]

If you walk north along Broadway on New York’s Upper West Side, into Harlem and beyond, around Sugar Hill, the site of the 1994 Wesley Snipes’ film, and Hamilton Heights, where Alexander Hamilton spent the last two years of his life when that area that was still farmland, you will see, if you look closely, […]

“One man’s meat is another man’s poison.” Lucretius Some call bureaucratic regulations “job killers” that stifle economic growth Others call them protections that safeguard human health and the environment. Whatever they are, they are an endangered species, as the Trump administration rolls back Obama-era regulations at a record-breaking pace. Because these decisions are made unilaterally […]

Two hundred years ago 17-year-old Thomas Cole emigrated from England to the United States, where he would revolutionize painting in his new country by creating “wild landscapes that were unmistakably American.” Born at the onset of the industrial revolution, Cole discovered in the American wilderness an antidote to the polluted rivers, poisoned air, and exploited […]

“The earth laughs in flowers,” Ralph Waldo Emerson. Kalman Aron died late last month at the age of 93. When he was 16, the Germans invaded his Latvian homeland and within two years had murdered most of the country’s Jews, including his parents. Aron spent the next four years in seven concentration camps, and in […]

I have written in the past about universal service for all Americans, not military service only, but a whole range of “opportunities” – from working in our underfunded public schools to cleaning up our national parks to rebuilding our crumbling infrastructure, from the Peace Corps to the Civilian Conservation Corps – and nobody ever disagreed. […]

James G. Blaine

Most of us undervalue what seem our tiny contributions to our communities and the world. As a result, we feel powerless, even victimized. But, like the butterfly effect in science, the lives we lead with our families, in our communities, and at work – all the so-called little things we do – collectively change the world. As I grow older, my ambition grows more modest but not less important: to participate fully and to contribute what I can. That’s my goal with this blog.